BETTY
Her voice resounds with echoes of yesterday.
‘While we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.’
Fess up Sylvie. Where did you read that?
‘Jorge Luis Borges in The Garden of Forking Paths.’
I did not bother saying anything.
‘And every woman is two women.’
Sylvie being in my head made me two women, and that other woman was driving me cra-cra. To erase her from my thoughts, I turned my mind to something more exciting. It was going be our birthday soon.
We would be twenty-eight on Friday-week and I was having a party. I know, it was not like me to draw attention to myself, but going out of character keeps people on their tippy-toes. Naturally, Sylvie was not on my exclusive invite list, way too risky.
I always preferred even numbers – the year would be‘Red in claw and tooth’, all hammers and nails, I thought. Then I caught myself. I was getting all intellectual, quoting from ‘In Memoriam’ A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, no less.‘You misquoted,’ Sylvie said, deflating me in seconds.‘One thing I have learned is that people never learn.’
That remark made me bristle. To calm down, I ran a bath and filled it with essential oils. I tried to relax inhaling the gorgeous aromas of geranium, rose and neroli, but I could not settle.
That she-devil never gave me a minute of peace. I reflected on how she had been scaring the living bejeezus out of me with her vasectomy obsession. I told her about my trepidation the following morning.
SYLVIE
Scaring Betty? Now really. All I do is show her a relatively straightforward, snip-snip procedure. But I can tell it vexes her by the way she runs out of her own house without making me leave first. Highly unusual behaviour.
‘How can you even think of it?’ she says (actually, she shouts). ‘You are so obviously not a highly trained surgeon.’
But then again, I have always been good at sewing. No worries on that score.
BETTY
I was going to kill Terry Baker anyway. I could not let my erratic twin outdo me again.
Consequently, I made another attempt to distract her until she forgot about both Lynch and MY next victim. And nothing succeeds in distraction, I told myself, as much as a sordid and painful past.
In a sisterly way, I tried to get Sylvie to talk about her time in the unit. I had persisted on a sporadic basis with trying to get her to ‘open up’ (as they say; bleurch). It was a sore subject, but (I told her) I was trying to get round to making amends, in the hope that she might not want to murder me in my sleep (or when wide awake even). I suspected Sylvie preferred the former, but I had several locks on my bedroom door, so no chance there.
However, strangely enough, I found myself also drifting back to that time of turmoil – that time of whirling and swirling thoughts, when my moods were not only swinging but also swaying and doing about turns. That was before I learnt the importance of order. Since that time, I also found I could sometimes quell my wrath by inhaling deeply and exhaling until you have to gasp for air.
‘Do you remember,’ I said to Sylvie, ‘two pivotal events that happened in lightning quick succession before we turned thirteen?’
SYLVIE
Of course, I remember, but I let her talk in pretend shrink mode. She was dreadful at it.
BETTY
This was what I said, or at least started to say, whilst I could get a word in edgeways.
‘The first event entailed you and the boy next door, well down the road from our chateaux, in Aix-en-Provence, one of those run-down ones, some might describe it is shabby chic.’
Only, I mentally removed the word ‘chic’.
SYLVIE
I have to interrupt her at the very start.
‘Okay, it’s a sweltering August day,’ I tell her. ‘I made an acquaintance, a boy, the same age as us, but he looks and acts younger. I use him as an excuse to get away from you and our fusty domicile. That is all there is to it,finis!’
BETTY
I could not let her get off that easily.
‘I remember the atrocious mess you made,’ I said. ‘Repugnant it was. The blood-filled syringe and splatters on the floor we saw before the rest of the scene allayed no fears. He, Gerard, was not hurt physically (much).’
‘We were just playing “quacks and nurses”,’ Sylvie said.
Whatever you called it, the sight still made me queasy. The other witness, his mother, skipped nausea and flew straight into a rage, like a vertical take-off. She grabbed you roughly by the arm and dragged you out onto the street and back to our home. Mama sorted it out, or so I thought, in her own indomitable way. An envelope was handed over, full of cash; she uttered something – a threat, no doubt – then she waved the bewildered mother and her protestations off and slammed the door.
Gossip was rife in the village that evening over pastis and cognacs; there was talk of little else. I heard a man say with vehemence that the boy’s mother should have called the Gendarme. ‘Too late, her words against mine,’ mama said when I told her. ‘Déni plausible,’ she added.
I remember looking that up. Plausible deniability, denying all knowledge. I liked the sound of it.
Papa fled to his room; mama spent the rest of the evening pacing up and down, pausing only to stare at Sylvie and then me, and trying to work out which one of us had committed quack-gate as I called it.
And fifteen years later in my kitchen I glared at Sylvie again. ‘What I observed that day was irrefutable evidence of your inability to read people’s emotions, despite pretending otherwise.’
She looked bemused at my accusation, not at all helpful. I noted that the puzzlement she felt, as I questioned her was fronted by a suitable expression – learned behaviour. Another one of her flaws she had tried to overcome. She had many more than me.
SYLVIE
‘Now let me tell a tale about you, dear sis,’ I say. ‘When you were at school, you could not abide Cecile Berger.’
BETTY
How dare she mention that name. ‘I never took to anyone prettier, wittier or brighter than me,’ I said. ‘That is not my fault, I was born that way.’
SYLVIE
‘Don’t interrupt,’ I say. I could see I had unnerved her.
And then I proceed to parade the details, to the forefront of my brain. A faint recollection that had been swept beneath the folds begins to rattle along with metronomic timing, until it is so vivid and I am there, once again.
On the first day back at that mind-numbing school after a six-week break, Betty gets up early and takes newly laid wasp traps (with the toxic killing solution removed) down from our wild garden. She furtively walks to one of the school outbuildings, sticks tape over a small hole in the window and lets a score or more wasps out. She retreats quickly closing the creaky door behind her.
‘Lair, lair!’ Betty shouts, rudely interrupting me, I continue. Although more accurately, she yells it in French, ‘Repaire,repaire!’
During playtime on that day, she tells petite Cecile she has a surprise for her. Cecile is apprehensive but follows Betty nonetheless. As they near the shed, Betty waits patiently for her to catch up. When she grips Cecile’s ponytail and pulls it, the rest of her naturally followed.
BETTY
At that point of her little macabre fantasy, I screamed at her, ‘Must I listen to this?!’
Her answer was blunt and I felt overwhelmed and unable to stop her.
‘Yes,’ she said as she went on.
SYLVIE
I continue.
‘With her other hand, innocent Betty opens the door and shoves Cecile in. Dismally for Betty, a few wasps escape, but many stay behind.
‘Betty bolts the door and runs back to the playground. She beckons me over and says, someone is locked in the shed. “Do you want to help?” she asks. Naturally, I run. I hear a scream. Others hear it too, including Madame Lousteau. They arrive in time to see me unlocking the door and Cecile careering out, gasping and glazed. “Bee stung lips,” Betty says to me under her breath. “Some people pay a lot to look like that.”’
BETTY
What a relief her story was over or so I thought. She gave me one last withering look. ‘That is when they took me away,’ she said.
For someone who lived so much in the present, Sylvie had a maddingly persistent memory for painful moments, especially those associated with me. Hence, some fifteen years later, we were in my kitchen still arguing about it.
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